American Indians: the Polish Connection

It is March, 2018, only a few months after the protests at Standing Rock, North Dakota against a proposed pipeline across historic Sioux territory. The Standing Rock  Campaign has been, and is, one of the largest movements of North American Indians since Wounded Knee in the 1970’s, reaching significant numbers of the non-inidigenous population, particularly young people and environmentalists. It is recognized by more and more that ongoing economic dependence on fossil fuels is bad for the environment as for people and when this realization is combined with a rejection of the injustice of further incursions into indigenous land a mass movement can arise; and it has.      

If, as indigenous groups always knew, and more and more and more others are now understanding, water is life, then there is nothing more important for living creatures than to safeguard water. This was the vision that Russell Means, leader of the American Indian Movement in the 1980’sexpressed at an ecological conference in the Black Hills of Dakota. For Means, living was a spiritual state, while property is merely physical. It follows that if life requires water then water is spiritual too. The functional approach to nature of the colonizing Europeans interfered with Nature and Means predicted that nature would eventually have its way. The growing pollution and climate change caused by industrial processes represent a kind of natural world revenge that Means understood.    

In terms of imperial human imposition on nature there can be few more extraordinary insults than the famous presidential carvings at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The sculpture of four former presidents on Mount Rushmore in the state occupies the sacred land of the Lakota Indians and so symbolizes in material form the subjugation of America’s first nations by the European invaders, who became Americans.  Beyond colonial appropriation the carvings actually depict the material conquest of the Nature worshipped by the native inhabitants of the area as their spiritual womb. In this case the medium is definitely the message. Thus, the four giant presidential heads make a giant statement, more about conquest of the land than the will of nature itself.

Less well known, but close by, another giant head looks out across the hills of South Dakota. It is the sculpted head of Crazy Horse chief of the Oglala first nation. It was carved from the hills to remind the world of the other side of the American dream, the enduring spirit of the American Indian in the face of its ongoing American holocaust. The sculpture of Crazy Horse was created by Polish-American Korczak Ziolkowski, a brave artist committed to the truth about American history. The memorial has now been under construction for over 70 years. This long journey was not always easy and some, including native Indians considered Ziolkowski’s sculpture to be as much a violation as the Presidential Heads. I believe that the Crazy Horse carving honours the guardians of the land while the American memorial celebrates those responsible for its ongoing destruction and associated genocide. The sculpture’s importance in capturing in stone the Indian reality was recently told in a new book by MaciejJarkowiec, about the history of Indian struggles, PowroceJako Piorun (“I will return like thunder”, a quotation from the words of Lakota chief Russell Means, former head of the American Indian Movement). 

Korczak Ziolkowski, self-taught sculptor, was born in Boston. After a tragic childhood when both his parents died before his first birthday, at sixteen Ziolkowski turned to carving as a hobby and met supporters who enabledhim to pursue this art as a career that        
included a statue of renowned pianist Ignacy Paderewski. Initially employed around the
site of the Mount Rushmore presidential memorial, Ziolkowski was invited by the local chief to create a sculpture of Crazy Horse, an independent spirit held in almost mystical reverence by many Indians, and one who rejected any compromises with the American invaders. Legend has it that Crazy Horse said “my land is where all my dead are buried” and these words will be inscribed in the monument, now over seventy years in construction, when completed.  As well as the head of Crazy Horse the monument presents the chief with his hands outstretched towards his people’s ancestral lands.  True to his uncompromising principles Crazy Horse allowed no photographs to be made of him so Ziolkowski’ssculpture is based on generic Lakota characteristics. Fatefully according to some, sculptor Ziolkowski was himself was born on Sept.6.1908, the same day as the chief’s death, 31 years later.

Since 1947, when he started his remarkable undertaking, Ziolkowski initially lived in a tent on the site and spent the rest of his days working on the project. To this day the Ziolkowski’s dream continues as a living monument to America’s Indians and is much more than a sculpted head. The legend of Crazy Horse himself was believed to be incarnate in American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means and Korczak wanted the work to be funded only by donations from the people. Consequently he refused several large government grants. The scale of the sculpture, designed to be to be 10 times bigger than the presidential memorial, is enormous, both physically and culturally. Around the head of Crazy Horse there has by now been created a community centre, medical service, museum and a university. Of Ziolkowski’s ten children born at the site seven remain and continue the work to this day. 

After his sudden death in 1982 Ziolkowski’s body was buried in the mountain. His epitaph describes him as writer in stone. Many leaders worldwide sent condolences and aletter of Lech Walesa, founder of Solidarity, Poland’s workers’ movement, declared him to be, as a     Pole, proud of Ziolkowski’s work that symbolizes heroism, freedom  and invincibility. A visionary to the end, Ziolkowski left plans for a university and hospital at the site that honours Crazy Horse, another indomitable spirit. A chief of the Sioux nation, Henry Standing Bear, praised Ziolkowski for showing the whites that “redskins have their heroes too” and trusted this Polish orphan, “storyteller” to tell the history. 

The Crazy Horse memorial is an extraordinary accomplishment in itself but it has also contributed to the growing strength and awareness of indigenous issues in recent years, not least of which is the Idle No More movement in Canada. In the U.S.A. 700 tribes meet at an annual pow-wow in Albuquerque, and even political leaders, like Barak Obama, who withdrew a pipeline construction plan and Justin Trudeau of Canada, who didn’t, but pledged a new “nation to nation” relationship with Canada’s first nations, have taken notice. A major journal on indigenous affairs, called “Native People” attracts 155,000.  Maybe they are becoming fearful of the prediction of an old native chief that “when the black snake goes under the river” apocalypse will follow. For all the newfound goodwill the struggle goes on. The anti-pipeline occupation at Standing Rock was forcibly removed at a cost of 300 injured protesters, 500 arrests and a cost of 1 million dollars to the U.S. state. Teepees have been built beside the Washington memorial and the Trump Tower in  the same city.